demagogue on 12/1/2009 at 22:17
With all that space, it's not procedural generation you want, but a baked city with all that insane detail, so you get really thoughtful artistic design and story in. (You could use the procedure to generate a city, then go back and artistically fill in unique details.)
I had similar thoughts about this topic when I read about modding for id's Rage and megatexturing. Megatextures take up a lot of size, basically a single massive bitmap without a single repeating pixel (if you wanted), but Bluray takes down one hurdle to their potential.
You can now artistically design huge cities with novel detail down to the grassblade pixel, no repeating textures, and bake it into a megatexture, and it will never slow the game down. The only major issue left is the processing power to actually do the baking/compression for the game. You need insane memory just to open the thing in Paintshop.
But my brainstorm was that maybe you could prepare everything in advance in pieces, and then rent time on a big system to do the actual baking overnight, burn the result to a bluray disk, and watch the Rage videos to see what's possible.
Then the catch is the gameplay on Rage will probably be iffy; too bad we won't have a Darkmod for Rage.
On that note, though, Doom 3 does have code to handle Megatextures. The main hurdle with it is there's no compression, so it's the sheer size of them that's an issue. But again Bluray might be a saving grace on that, if they get code to read the map off the disk. And once Doom 3 goes open source, it will be possible to update the megatexture code to greatly improve its performance and get decent compression, which I have an idea some Doom3 modding guys are already thinking about doing.
So all that gets me thinking maybe megatextures + bluray + Darkmod = massive, non-repeating city-scapes at pixel-level detail with great gameplay. And all of this is what's possible basically now with some work. The next generation can really run with this, I think.
